Introduction to the Course: Lecture Notes From the First Week
What follows are some of the basic issues raised in lecture during the first week of class.  In this section of Lecture notes you will find both the content of the PowerPoint slides from lecture as well as a discussion of issues that we talked about during the class.  These notes are intended to help out people who joined us late; nevertheless, they are not a substitute for attendance at lecture.  Discussion, exercises, videos, and examples cannot be translated to the web site.  For more information consult classmates, textbooks, and workbooks.  For clarification of ideas contact your lab instructor or Dr. Slagell.

LECTURE DAY 1: POWER POINT SLIDE CONTENT
Welcome to Speech Communication 212 Fall 2007

WHY are you required to take this course?

• Speaking and Listening are recognized as crucial job skills. [The National Association of Colleges and Employers survey employers.  Their publication, Job Outlook 2006, ranks Communication Skills as the #1 job skill!  And this was reaffirmed in 2007; take a look]

• Each of us will need to communicate ideas orally before groups large or small.

• Even in a technological age, public speaking is important. Broadcast of public speeches has increased the potential size of the audience. Information overload has led us to need someone to help us make sense of the material. We want human interaction.

• Jo Sprague and Douglas Stuart in The Speaker's Handbook identify a four step process to skill building:

• unconscious incompetence
• conscious incompetence
• conscious competence
• unconscious competence

• Meet the 212 staff
• Think about how we learn
• Look at the syllabus and policies for the course
• Reflect and set goals
• Assignments for Wednesday [preview WebCT Gold]
  

How do we learn what we learn?

• Cone of Learning: Dale and Hyland  [here is a link to a nice visual of the Cone of Learning]
  

Implications:

Activities in Lecture

• daily work
• learn with your neighbor/ small group work
• make announcements to lecture
• Lecture/Lab Schedule
• Assignments and Course Policies
• Course Support material

What does a person need to know to be a successful public speaker?

What do you want to learn about public speaking?

On Wednesday:

• Attend Lecture.

• Get the required texts:

• Lucas, The Art of Public Speaking, 9th ed. With CD-ROM
• Slagell, Speech Communication 212 Workbook, 10th edition
• Read the workbook,  pp. 4-8
• Read ch. 1 of the textbook and do ex. 2 p. 29 and (bring to lecture on Friday)
  
• Review the syllabus so that you can ask questions about it
• Log onto WebCT Gold to fill out the background survey form
  
• Check your schedule to see what speaking dates would work best for you
• Take a deep breath and assure yourself that you can succeed in this course if you invest your time wisely.

I. Audience centeredness is the key concept we focus on in this course.

A. You want to develop the attitude that you are speaking for the benefit of the audience, not simply to hear yourself speak.

B.  Developing a "rhetorical sensitivity" means that you become increasingly conscious of how your public speaking choices--of topic, words, delivery style, examples, visual aids--impact the audience impression of you.

1.  In a sense what you "meant" to say is irrelevant; in the transient communication moment what the audience "heard" or "understood" is what matters.
2.  Rhetorical sensitivity means recognizing the negative impact of asking a teacher something like: "Are we doing anything important today?"

C.  It is of the utmost importance that you come to realize that audiences are not out to "get you", but rather, are out to see you succeed.

1. Almost all of the audiences you face will hope to gain something of value from your presentation.
2. Aim to view that audience disposition as a source of support, as a vote of confidence, rather than as a source of anxiety.

D. In this course we want to see you do well and the syllabus, text, workbook, website, and all of the instructors aim to give you the tools with which you can build your own success.

A. For some people public speaking creates Fear, Stress or Worry.

B. But with the Information learned in the course, the hard work you put in, the practice you get, and the time you invest in developing the skills and mastering the concepts, you will soon feel better about meeting the demands of those inevitable speaking opportunities.

C. Even in a technological age, public speaking is important.

• technology increases the size of our audiences
• yet we value having a human face to connect with the info we are hearing

• Jo Sprague and Douglas Stuart in The Speaker's Handbook identify a four step process to skill building:
• unconscious incompetence
• conscious incompetence
• conscious competence
• unconscious competence

I. What do you need to know to be a successful public speaker?

A.  Discussion of class reflections on this question from last class and responses to the homework (ex. 2 p. 29).

B. Curiously these needs are strikingly similar to those articulated in classical Greece and Rome.

1. Training in public speaking was one of the first subject matters that people were paid to teach.

a. After the overthrow of a tyrant and the rise of democracy in Sicily there were many law suits as people tried to resolve conflicting claims over property rights.
b.  Corax of Syracuse compiled the first system of rules for organizing and arguing a case before a jury and sold his system.

2. In the Greek City State of Athens Democracy meant wide-spread demand for public speaking talents.

3.  A variety of rhetoric schools and later texts emerged in Greek culture and were then adapted to Roman needs as they rose to power.

4.  In the anonymous Rhetoric Ad Herenium and in Cicero's early work De Inventione (both circa mid-80s B.C.E.) we have the first Latin rhetoric books that establish a very practical method of teaching these skills; we call it The Roman Rhetorical Canon.

a. invention--the art of discovering, creating, or selecting the material and content of a speech (or paper).
b. arrangement--the art of organization or the arrangement of content
c. style--the art of language and expression; word choice
d. delivery--the art of skilled verbal and nonverbal communication
e. memory--the art of memorization or development of mnemonics to help us remember what we planned to say

5.  We still teach public speaking using these areas of focus, though some notions, such as audience adaptation, have developed a good deal since the classical period.

A.  We call it "The Speech Communication Model."
[See Lucas textbook chapter 1 for definitions and detailed coverage of the model]
B.  Important terms to understand include:

Speaker--encoder
Message--all of the verbal and non-verbal content you project to the audience
Audience--decoder
Channel--that which carries the message to the audience--radio, air, P.A. system
Feedback--this is the feature that shows that communication is a two-way street; your audience will give you signals concerning its response to you and your information.
Situation--all the dynamics of the speech situation, such as location, time of day, previous speakers, reason for meeting together, etc. will effect your audience's expectations of you and your message.
Interference--anything that prevents the message from getting through clearly; this can be external noise such as a baby crying, or internal noise such as audience members worrying about something irrelevant to the speech or their fervent disagreement with something you said earlier that prevents them from hearing what you say later.
Culture--This is the part of the model not covered in the textbook, but it is important to recognize that every speaking situation is also situated within a particular culture and the expectations of that culture will have an impact on a speaker's range of choices.

A. Monday you begin Introductory Speeches in labs.

1. Follow guidelines in the workbook.
2. It is intended to be a non-threatening speech designed to give you a first sense of being in front of this group talking about what you know best.

B.  As we move into the Informative Speaking Unit we will do two speeches.

1.  The Paired Perspectives Speech Assignment is an opportunity to do a simple, brief informative speech with a partner.

--Note that the grading criteria focus purely on formal matters of writing the speech--mostly disposito and that is what we will cover in the next lectures.

2.  The Informative Speech Assignment will give you a chance to treat a more sophisticated, interesting and demanding topic.